Under the Patronage of the Minister of Political Development, the Al Quds Center for Political Studies announced the launching of “The Civic Network for Parliamentary Monitoring in the Arab world”. This was the culmination of a two-day regional workshop held in Amman on “Strengthening the Role of Civil Society in Monitoring Parliaments in the Arab World”. Held on March 20-21, 2010, with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the workshop summoned over 50 political and intellectual figures from eleven Arab countries.

Regional experiences were presented at the workshop, where representatives from Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Jordan presented case studies of the state of civic monitoring of the parliamentary performance in those countries.

Noting the diverse levels of experiences encountered in the region in the sphere of monitoring the parliaments, participants arrived at the urgent need to disseminate a culture and knowledge of how civil society could act as an efficient watchdog on the performance of the parliament.

Accordingly, Al Quds Center proposed the founding of a regional network of civil society institutions that would work on monitoring parliaments in the Arab world. This network would provide the space for exchanging experiences and best practices in this field, and would coordinate the efforts of civil society organizations in monitoring parliaments in their countries. The CNPM is to construct a website and would issue newsletters and periodicals. It would liaise with other national and regional networks engaged in electoral, parliamentary, and constitutional reform in Arab societies. CNPM would deliver training programs, manuals and codes on effective monitoring of parliaments.

The CNPM elected its Steering Committee which is composed of members from Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Bahrain and Jordan. The CNPM elected Mr. Oraib Rantawi as the general coordinator of the network.